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Watch out, Google. The rumors are true. Yahoo has officially
stepped up its security A-game. It’s called Alex Stamos.

Yahoo announced yesterday that it hired the world-renowned
cybersecurity expert and vocal NSA critic to command its team of
“Paranoids” in bulletproofing all of its platforms and products
from threats that will surely come.

The headline-grabbing hire is widely being viewed as Yahoo’s
attempt to restore its reputation for trustworthiness in the
fallout of a recent rash of ad-related malware attacks
that jeopardized millions of its users’ identifying data.

Yahoo officials would not comment on his appointment, which
replaces the company’s former vice president of information
security, Justin Somaini, who left Yahoo in January 2013 and has
since taken a position as “chief trust officer” at Box. It’s been speculated that Somaini
resigned from Yahoo after reportedly coming under fire amid
spam-borne cross-site scripting
(XSS) hacking attacks that plagued the revamped Yahoo Mail
last year.

Who is Alex Stamos?
The San Francisco-based veteran information security researcher
known for his authoritative expertise in cloud computing, web,
mobile and network applications security and beyond, humbly
describes himself as a “security guy” in his Twitter bio. But
that’s hardly an adequate encapsulation of Stamos’s widely
respected cybersecurity prowess, acumen and career
accomplishments.

Here are some interesting facts that you might not know about the
man Yahoo is trusting to keep cybercrime, in all its nasty and
ever-evolving forms, out of its business and the business of its
millions of users:

1. He’s a longtime respected leader in the information
security space.
Before coming aboard at Yahoo, Stamos served as chief technology
officer of Artemis, a leading San Francisco-based Internet
security firm that specializes in .secure Top-Level Domain
security (TLD), over the last year and 10 months, according to
his LinkedIn profile. Prior
to his stint at Artemis, he co-founded iSEC Partners “with
good friends.” Artemis’s parent company NCC Group acquired the
pioneering security firm in late 2010.

Before launching iSEC Partners, Stamos held a two-year post as a
managing security architect at @stake, Inc., a digital security
company that helped corporations secure their critical
infrastructure and applications. Symantec acquired @stake, Inc.
in late 2004. Stamos also worked as a senior security engineer
for nearly two years at LoudCloud, a software company now called
Opsware that operates out of the same city Yahoo calls home base.

Earlier, on June 7, 2013, Stamos published an often-cited blog
post on his personal blog titled
“ A Taxonomy of PRISM
Possibilities.” It presents an exhaustive list of theories
and possibilities relating to the federal mass electronic
spying program program, peppered with his own commentary in
italics throughout.

Stamos said his aim in posting and updating the list is to
“improve the quality of the public discussion” about the PRISM
scandal. One of the tags he used to categorize the content in the
post is “your rights online.”

3. He’s a top keynote speaker at some of world’s leading
information security conferences.
TrustyCon is only the latest in a long list of high profile
security conferences Stamos’ has headlined. He’s also spoken at
several similarly top level information security conferences,
including Black Hat, DEF CON Hacking Conference,
FS-ISAC, Microsoft BlueHat Security
Briefings and Infragard, a partnership
between private sector and the FBI.

Up to this point, Stamos has tweeted quite a bit, often
commenting multiple times per week, and sometimes per day, about
various online privacy- and security-related topics, as well as
about industry events he supports, attends or speaks at.

He recently took to Twitter to caution users of the popular
“anonymous” tell-all Secret mobile app causing a
stir in Silicon Valley not to spill “inside” information on
the controversial app, which might not be so secret if
authorities subpoena its developers.

Dear Silicon Valley, it's unlikely that "Secret" is secret from
a subpoena. Do not throw inside information up there.
Seriously.